Latest results may stem more from IE9 and Firefox fixes than any Chrome falter.

Once again, Firefox has maintained its grip on second place, behind Internet Explorer. And as Chrome falls away, there's now a gap of more than one percentage point between the browsers.

During 2011, Chrome's rise was unstoppable, and it looked as if taking second place was an inevitability. In 2012, Google's browser has come close, but never quite managed to close the gap, even with Google's extensive advertising and promotion.

Internet Explorer and Firefox are essentially unchanged, each gaining 0.03 points to 53.63 and 20.08 percent respectively. Chrome has dropped 0.27 points to 18.86 percent, Safari picked up 0.16 points for a total of 5.26 points, and Opera edged up slightly, by 0.04 points to 1.62 percent.

Firefox and Internet Explorer have both stopped shedding users to Chrome, halting Google's growth. This may merely be a temporary reprieve, but it could also be indicative of a broader trend: there's a lot less reason to switch to Chrome than there used to be.

Internet Explorer 9 arguably steadied Microsoft's ship. The browser isn't perfect, and probably doesn't do enough to win over advocates of Firefox or Chrome (thanks to their rich third-party ecosystems). But IE9 is attractive and more than fast enough for modern Web applications, putting it squarely in the "good enough" category.

Firefox too has had issues, but Mozilla has arguably put those behind it. Firefox's transition from a traditional "big infrequent release" model to a Chrome-like "every six weeks" caused early difficulties. Mozilla's update infrastructure wasn't able to handle these regular releases, forcing manual user-visible updates. However, the current Firefox updater is a lot simpler and more automatic, easing a lot of the pain. We see the evidence for this in the graphs charting the switching between Firefox versions. Although there's still a non-negligible legacy issue, most Firefox users are now on the treadmill and upgrading regularly.

The introduction of Firefox's rapid release schedule also caused alarm from Firefox-using companies such as IBM, with those companies claiming that enterprise users can't cope with such rapid releases. Mozilla has addressed this concern too, with the Firefox 10 Extended Support Release.

As such, a lot of the impetus to abandon Firefox and switch to Chrome—which users certainly threatened to do in the early days of the rapid release policy—has evaporated.

This makes Chrome a harder sell than it once was, and that may explain the interruption to its once-unstoppable growth.

Internet Explorer 10 isn't a major concern yet, but this month it will start to pick up. The browser is likely to launch for Windows 7 simultaneously with Windows 8's general availability on October 26.

I keep seeing a lot of IE9 adverts on TV. It's kind of strange to still be seeing them with IE10 less than a month away. I would think MS would be hyping IE10 at this point, especially since the only people who can't run IE10 are the ones MS (and the rest of the world) would highly prefer to upgrade :XP and Vista users.

This needs to be reiterated:

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The introduction of Firefox's rapid release schedule also caused alarm from Firefox-using companies such as IBM, with those companies claiming that enterprise users can't cope with such rapid releases. Mozilla has addressed this concern too, with the Firefox 10 Extended Support Release.

Short of a medically diagnosed case of rectal-cranial inversion, there's no excuse for a Firefox user to be using any Firefox release earlier than Firefox 10. No excuse at all.

Enough with the misleading Net Marketshare stats, Ars! Every website out there puts Chrome at 30% or higher, and you know it. There's no way either Chrome or Firefox are at only 20% or lower.

Also, how the hell would Safari have 3x Android's browser share, where there are 480 million Android devices and 410 iOS devices? Can't you see how misleading these stats are? How can you even count "market share" this way?

Hmmm... been trying out Chrome, Android stock, and Firefox lately on the tablet and phone. Haven't gone back to dolphin. All good browsers, with Chrome working a bit better on some sites than Android stock.

Also think it be quite lame to advertise a browser, especially since IE pretty much is there.

Enough with the misleading Net Marketshare stats, Ars! Every website out there puts Chrome at 30% or higher, and you know it. There's no way either Chrome or Firefox are at only 20% or lower.

Also, how the hell would Safari have 3x Android's browser share, where there are 480 million Android devices and 410 iOS devices? Can't you see how misleading these stats are? How can you even count "market share" this way?

The last part is something that has confused people a lot. People interpret as android users not using their phones as smartphones but like features phones. While that may be true and I know personal experience means nothing, even people I know with Boost Mobile Androids use the internet on the phone despite the terrible performance of the browse on gingerbread. But again that means nothing relative to the truth.

Net Marketshare isn't the only one putting IE in a strong lead with Firefox and Chrome below 20%.

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Also, how the hell would Safari have 3x Android's browser share, where there are 480 million Android devices and 410 iOS devices? Can't you see how misleading these stats are? How can you even count "market share" this way?

If Android users aren't browsing the 'net as much as their iOS counterparts, that's not altogether surprising, given that there's no Android device that's a good match for the iPad.

Also, how the hell would Safari have 3x Android's browser share, where there are 480 million Android devices and 410 iOS devices? Can't you see how misleading these stats are? How can you even count "market share" this way?

It would be nice to understand some of the details of Net Marketshare's methodology. It seems that on the desktop they count unique user shares per country and then aggregate these shares up based on estimates on total internet usage in those countries.

One obvious (and well discussed) issue is that unique visitors might be quite different from usage shares. I might use all browsers on my PC once a month, but I use one of them 99% of the time.

The other issue is the quality of the data that goes into country-specific weights (garbage in -> garbage out). Presumably, the weight on China has a huge impact one way or another. To what extent can we trust those weights? It would be nice to also publish market shares based on constant weights (such as last-year's weights) in order to abstract away from changes in country weights. Alternatively, it would be nice to publish trends for different regions f the world as well as the country weights - then readers can form their own opinion on what the numbers mean.

I finally got fed up with the password system in Chrome and switched back to Firefox. It's really annoying when you have a bunch of passwords that change every 90 days that Chrome does not let you update them easily. It seems to require a complete history wipe and most of the time that did not even work. (There was probably some simple fix to this that I never figured out, but still)

Here's hoping those jerks using the (the completely abandoned and totally deprecated) 3.6.x release will finally fucking upgrade to an actual modern browser.

Firefox 3.6 is still very modern if you're looking at its HTML5 support, it's just doesn't have a very fast layout and javascript engine. I didn't stop using FF3.6 as my primary browser until Firefox got to around v12, because FFpost-3.6 was not livable until v12.

Lets hope Mozilla speed up its layout engine development and not just IonMonkey. Because frankly even almost two years later, IE9's Trident still leaves FF15's Gecko in the dust at real life rendering speed and performance. And Mozilla hasn't got any room left to slack around because the upcoming IE10's Trident is even faster than Webkit.

I'm betting Google dropping support for IE8 next month on Google Apps including Gmail, even though it's still the world's most popular browser, followed by prompts to update to a more modern browser (ie. Chrome) will serve to restart Chrome's browser share rise. Now I'm not a fan of IE8, but seeing IE8 is still the most popular browser on the internet with a quarter browser share, in the interest of users you'd think Google would consider making an exception to their most recent 2 browser version support rule continue supporting IE8 a little bit longer. After-all, Google was once trying to push Google Apps into corporations and government and that is probably where IE8 usage is highest.

My experience: I switched back to Firefox from Chrome a couple of months ago because of a major rendering bug that didn't seem to get fixed. All the same, I need to use Chrome to access a financial services site that doesn't render in Firefox. But the search behavior in FF is much better IMO, and in balance there's no good reason to abandon that for Chrome. Perhaps a similar effect is happening to IE these days.

A LOT of corporate setups rely strictly on IE as their standard browser. Furthermore, there are a lot of sites out there that rely strictly on IE to display properly. Personally, I have recently purchased a wireless IP security camera that can be viewed through any of the major browsers, but the only way to get the full functionality and controls associated with is to use IE. If I am required to write specialized code for a specific browser, and I only wish to do so once, I would target the one with the largest market share - which happens to be IE (further perpetuating the cycle). In the end I keep an updated version of all three browsers on my personal systems and use which ever one fits the task at hand. For general, streamlined browsing I prefer Chrome; Firefox has the largest array of plugins/extensions providing useful tools and security additions when I need them; IE gets used when the other two fail (as in situations such as with my IP camera) - but it is NEVER set as my default browser.

If Android users aren't browsing the 'net as much as their iOS counterparts, that's not altogether surprising, given that there's no Android device that's a good match for the iPad.

Wouldn't surprise me at all if this is the difference. In other words, iPhone users and Android users basically using their browsers at the same average rates. iPad users and Android-tablet users basically using their browsers at the same much higher rate than for smartphone users. Modern smartphones are pretty good for web browsing, but the limitations of the small screen mean most people will save any "serious" browsing for when they are using a PC or tablet. Since iPad still enjoys a pretty big lead among tablets, this could heavily skew the results towards Safari.

If you allow even slightly more browsing by iPhone users (anecdotally possible based on my circle of friends/co-workers/acquaintances), then it just makes the numbers even easier to swallow.

The idea of iPhone users doing more browsing doesn't even require a logical leap like "iPhone users are more savvy users of their technology". If you just assume that people who plan to use the web a lot tend to pay up for better/faster phones, that might be enough to skew stats like this towards iPhone users.

I'm betting Google dropping support for IE8 next month on Google Apps including Gmail, even though it's still the world's most popular browser, followed by prompts to update to a more modern browser (ie. Chrome) will serve to restart Chrome's browser share rise.

Just because IE 8 is the world's most popular browser, doesn't mean it is the most popular browser for visiting gmail and google apps.

Ultimately, the only important stats are the ones for your own website — which are always going to be significantly different from the internet as a whole. For example, if your website only has english text then you will only get english speaking visitors, and browser marketshare will be different for that niche market.

Enough with the misleading Net Marketshare stats, Ars! Every website out there puts Chrome at 30% or higher, and you know it. There's no way either Chrome or Firefox are at only 20% or lower.

I think Net Marketshare has the most reliable stats in the world. It is really hard to get accurate data, but those guys have been doing it for longer than just about anyone.

All of those websites pegging chrome as the most popular browser are bogus in my opinion. There are a lot of people who are not allowed to install third party browsers on their work PC, and a lot more who just don't give a crap and are perfectly happy with whatever version of IE windows update makes them use.

Enough with the misleading Net Marketshare stats, Ars! Every website out there puts Chrome at 30% or higher, and you know it. There's no way either Chrome or Firefox are at only 20% or lower.

Also, how the hell would Safari have 3x Android's browser share, where there are 480 million Android devices and 410 iOS devices? Can't you see how misleading these stats are? How can you even count "market share" this way?

Also, how the hell would Safari have 3x Android's browser share, where there are 480 million Android devices and 410 iOS devices? Can't you see how misleading these stats are? How can you even count "market share" this way?

This would be because every iOS device is sold as a premium product that is intended to be used to browse the web. Many android devices simply run android because it is cheap.

If you compare the market share of android devices with similar spec to the iPhone of comparable age, I suspect that the numbers may be more in line with the reported browser stats.

Also, consider that Safari is really the only browser on iOS (other browsers are just a wrapper for it - so there is little point), whilst andriod has other options available.

That doesn't differentiate between Metro and Desktop and JavaScript touch events are supported in Desktop IE as well.

Yes, and I predict that this will be a problem for Windows users. The Metro version of IE is logically a "mobile" browser given it's limited Flash whitelist and lack of plug-in support, but I think few sites follow recommended practice of testing for capabilities rather than just looking at user agent strings. Many sites will end up kicking IE10 users out to the desktop rather than presenting content the way they would to an iPad.

As such, a lot of the impetus to abandon Firefox and switch to Chrome—which users certainly threatened to do in the early days of the rapid release policy—has evaporated.

This makes Chrome a harder sell than it once was, and that may explain the interruption to its once-unstoppable growth.

I read a lot of those threats in the Ars forum, too. I never understood how that worked.

"Firefox is updating every six weeks! It's ridiculous! That's it - I'm switching to a browser that updates just as often but without a mature extension ecosystem! Then I'm going to cut off my nose to spite my face!"

Although the transition was handled very badly, I never understood why switching to a rough equivalent (minus the extensions plus privacy concerns) was a viable option.